A family of necessity

Leah Stewart’s fourth novel, following 2011’s Husband and Wife, opens as 28-year-old Eloise Hempel, newly hired as a history professor at Harvard, receives a phone call from her 11-year-old niece Theo in Cincinnati. Eloise’s sister, Rachel, and her husband have died in a crash while on vacation. Theo and her siblings, Josh, 9, and Claire, 2, had been staying with Francine,...

The bonds of true friendship

The demise of a friendship can be just as traumatic as the end of a romantic relationship. Yet the rules of grieving for a friendship are endlessly more complicated than those for nursing a traditional broken heart. Can a friendship ever be mended once the bonds of trust have been shattered? That is the central question in Leah Stewart's The Myth of You & Me, and one that protagonist...